Helen Mirren hates the Guardian, and she hates female journalists. Before I meet her, I am told this a lot, by colleagues; she’s also hinted at it in previous interviews. This is somewhat unnerving and, it turns out, mostly rubbish: when I meet her at a hotel in London, it soon transpires that Mirren (who no longer looks at her own press) reads the Guardian every day and follows my Weekend magazine column “religiously”. (She says this twice. I intend to be buried with the tapes.) She is extremely warm, funny and impeccably mannered, just an hour after trending on Twitter for swearing live on breakfast TV (“It pissed with rain,” she said of a camping trip, and looked amazed when the presenters turned to camera to apologise).
It turns out that Mirren’s legendary grudge against the Guardian comes from another age, and is not unreasonable. When she was a young actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 1960s, a headline on a Guardian interview dubbed her The Sex Queen Of Stratford. The journalist wrote of Mirren “batting her big blue eyes” at him; her eyes are grey, she pointed out later, and there was no batting, but the condescending nickname stuck. In an excruciating 1975 television interview, Michael Parkinson introduced Mirren as “the sex queen”, before going on to make constant reference to her “physical attributes”, “sluttishness” and occasional nudity, despite her obvious annoyance.
Several decades, two Golden Globes, four Emmys, one Oscar, a Tony, five Baftas and a Fellowship later, Mirren is less concerned that her acting might take a back seat to her image. At 70, she is a new face of L’Oréal Paris, and thrilled to be the oldest recipient of a major (and lucrative) cosmetics contract. It’s important, she says, a big deal. “It was about time that someone of my age, not necessarily me, did it. Certainly my whole life, one had these images of perfect, incredibly youthful girls shoved at you as what you should aspire to,” she complains. “And we’re not even talking about 25-year-olds, incidentally, we are talking about girls of 15. Who looks 15? It’s not fair.”
Like overdue buses, older models are now arriving in clusters: last year, the cosmetics brand Nars overlooked high fa
